An aspect of the invention relates, in general, to text processing, and in particular, to facilitating processing associated with character data.
Text processing often requires the comparing of character data, including, but not limited to, the comparing of character data strings. Typically, instructions used to compare character data compare a single byte of data at a time.
Further, text processing often requires other types of character data processing, including finding the termination point (e.g., end of a string), determining the length of the character data, finding a particular character, etc. Current instructions to perform these types of processing tend to be inefficient.